Several countries around the world have adopted the inflation targeting regime for monetary policy. Despite the growing literature on the issue, it is not clear whether developing and emerging countries can improve their economic performance by adopting inflation targeting. This working paper...

Over the last decade, the Iranian government budget on military has been higher than the average of the world. The current increasing international sanctions aim to reduce the military capabilities and capacities of the Iranian government. We analyze the response of the Iranian economy to shocks...

The aim of this paper is to construct an indicator of potential growth for developed countries using the insights of the theoretical and empirical growth literature. The Pooled Mean Group Estimator of Pesaran, Shin and Smith (1999) that employs a panel data technique is used. This estimator is...

This paper reconsiders the political economy approach to growth and distribution according to which (1) rising inequality induces more government redistribution; (2) more government redistribution is financed by higher distortionary taxation; and (3) higher distortionary taxes reduce economic...

This study investigates the pro-poorness of income growth in Nigeria. Using nationally representative data for 1996 and 2004, overall income growth in Nigeria was found not to be pro-poor. The richer segments of the population appropriate greater share of benefits from economic growth. Household...

We consider the relationship between tourism and economic growth for Latin American countries since 1985 until 1998. The analysis proposed is based on a panel data approach and the Arellano-Bond estimator for dynamic panels. We obtain estimates of the relationship between economic growth and...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

In this paper we investigate the long-run and short-run relationship between housing investment and economic growth in China using the quarterly province-level panel data for the period 1999 q1 to 2007 q4. Recently developed econometric techniques for panel unit root testing and heterogeneous...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

This paper addresses heterogeneity in determinants of economic growth in a data-driven way. Instead of defining groups of countries with different growth characteristics a priori, based on, for example, geographical location, we use a finite mixture panel model and endogenous clustering to...